| Summary: | This thesis is working on the activity of those acting companies wearing royal, noble, or local livery in the pre-Shakespeare period. The work contains two major parts. The first section, scrutinising the patronage of players, tries to rebuild the role of players in the patronage system. Who were the patrons? How did patronage pass from one hand to another? What was the relationship between a livery company and its patron? Can a company’s travelling pattern reflect the sphere of influence of its master? These are the questions to be answered. Propaganda is the major concern of the second part of the thesis. In this section, the propagandist function of players is further investigated. The activity of major companies, including the Bale/Cromwell’s, Suffolk’s, Bedford’s, and Leicester’s, is thoroughly surveyed. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the acting business in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, examining whether this was the final phase of itinerant livery players and how these players accommodated themselves in the London Stage. Patronage and propaganda have for long been the concerns of both literary critics and historians. But few studies have ever tried to combined the achievement of the two disciplines into one study. This thesis is an attempt to put the livery acting business back into its historical context, showing that the fluctuations of the profession in the sixteenth century was a product of its particular time. This thesis is also the first work that is able to provide statistical evidence to verify these long-debated issues.
|
|---|
